She spoke out on a streamed program in 2015 that the LGBT community should not receive support from taxpayer's money, and repeated her claim in a monthly magazine piece in 2018.

[2] In December 2022, at the request of minister Takeaki Matsumoto, Sugita retracted and apologized for her past remarks regarding minorities, saying that they had "lacked consideration.

The statue commemorates as many as 200,000 comfort women from Korea and other countries forced into sex slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II.

Sugita was criticized by Lully Miura, an instructor at the Policy Alternatives Research Institute at the University of Tokyo who wrote, "Behavior as if questioning the actions of the victim instead of the perpetrator will spread the misunderstanding that it cannot be helped if something happens to a woman when she gets drunk in front of a man.

"[19] When approached for comment about the documentary by the Mainichi Shimbun, Sugita stated the video had been edited in a way that misrepresented her intentions and she was considering releasing her own footage of the interview.

The remark was likely related to Itō, a controversial figure due to her rape allegations, who was recently selected by Time magazine, as one of the world's 100 Most Influential People of 2020.

[22] In June 2015, Sugita made an appearance on the Japanese Culture Channel Sakura television program Hi Izuru Kuni Yori alongside music composer Koichi Sugiyama and fellow politician Kyoko Nakayama in which she claimed that there was no need for LGBT education in schools, dismissing concerns about high suicide rates among the community.

[3][23][24] In July 2018, Sugita wrote a controversial magazine article that said tax money should not be used to fund LGBT right initiatives because same-sex couples cannot reproduce and have "no productivity.

[28] Sugita was appointed as Parliamentary Vice-Minister at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in the reshuffled cabinet of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in August 2022.

[29] In 2023, she was found guilty in a non-binding case by the Legal Affairs Bureau of racial abuse and human rights violations against Korean people.